She nodded her thanks before turning back to Meesh. “There, you see? We know he’s an Ashurapolitan, he’s bad with personal finances and, most importantly, he’s over there, looking right at us…
“Shit! Come on!” She broke into a run just as Melchior did the same.
Their quarry grabbed a rack filled with metal levers and hauled it down behind himself to slow his pursuers, much to the dismay of a Chironian who’d been stacking more items on it. With an angry shout, he heaved one of the metal bars after the fleeing Ashurapolitan.
It struck him squarely between the shoulder blades and he stumbled straight into another rack filled with display units. The whole thing came crashing down on top of him and, when Mila pulled him out from beneath the pile, he was unconscious.
Meesh stood while she restrained Melchior’s wrists behind his back. “Don’t see anyone coming to his aid,” he told her. “I think we have a low-level scam artist on our hands.”
This would have been much easier if they could have just frozen Melchior on the spot but they’d come here to shut him up – if his information was true – not start more rumors. They’d just have to do things the old-fashioned way.
Unless, of course, his information proved to be a pile of random turds. If that were the case, they might even try to encourage him in his folly.
But first, they needed a place to talk. Meesh realized the offended Chironian who’d knocked Melchior down was now advancing on him, his features suffused with an anger that felt to be more a matter of form than fact. He would raise a fuss to avoid losing face with his comrades.
He slowed as Meesh put himself squarely in his path, one hand coming to rest on the grip of his pistol.
“I promise,” he told the smuggler, “we’ll give him a harder time than anything you have in mind.” He forced a grin onto his face, lips peeled back from his teeth so the Chironian would recognize the expression. “We’ll even throw in a little extra, just for your sake!”
The Chironian knew when he was being offered an escape and he took it like a good sport. You couldn’t just wave a gun at his kind and expect them to back off. A gun and a little respect, however, often worked wonders.
“He’s all yours, friend,” the long-limbed smuggler conceded with a grin. “Just don’t kill him. He owes me a lot of credits.”
“Is there someplace quiet we can take him?” Mila asked.
The Chironian’s head drew back slightly. “You two really aren’t from here, are you? This is Babilim Station. Everything the ancients built is sound-proof. If you close a door, you’re free to make all the noise you want.” He gestured at a section of wall that flowed out at the second level to form a room with windows overlooking the cargo floor. “Use that.”
With a nod of thanks, Meesh hauled Melchior over his shoulder, grateful that Ashurapolitans were, as a rule, skeletally thin. It was probably the only rule this idiot hadn’t gotten around to breaking.
They walked up a set of stairs that the locals had modified by inserting carbon-crete steps up against each double-sized riser, giving the impression of a stair with steps of alternating bronze and black. They turned left at the second level and entered the room.
Meesh could feel Melchior’s mind re-awakening. He dumped him roughly, but not roughly enough to cause harm. “Get that sheet of poly-film spread out,” he told Mila.
She frowned at him for half a second and then her expression cleared. “I thought you brought it.”
“Are you kidding me?” Meesh exclaimed. He could feel their captive clearly now. He was paying close attention. “Sure, there’s probably no forensics facilities out here but that doesn’t mean we get sloppy!” He felt hands close around his ankle.
“You don’t need to do this!” the Ashurapolitan said urgently. “I don’t actually know anything! I was just making up what seemed like a plausible story, so I could sell it to a few rubes. The Chironians stop at this station to trans-ship Humans from time to time, so I figured folks would believe a rumor if they heard it here.” He let go when Meesh shook his leg.
“You just made something up?” Meesh turned an incredulous look at Mila. Humans moving through here?
“Swear to gods,” the prisoner insisted. “Pure savannah-muffins!”
Meesh huffed out a breath, half laughing, shaking his head. “You silly half-wit! D’you have any idea how close you came to getting yourself killed?”
“I think the situation is pretty self-explanatory,” Mila offered dryly.
Meesh looked down at the prisoner. “So what are you telling your customers?”
“Well, you’re the first ones, as it turns out,” Melchior admitted, his mind starting to recover from the adrenaline-addled terror of imminent death. “I was going to claim that you’d found one of the other hangar-craters on the far side and got the ancient ships working.”
Meesh stared at him, not letting his face give anything away, but the idea of more centers like this one and of ancient ships…”
It was intriguing.
The uncomfortable silence grew and Melchior cleared his throat with a cough. “Then I’d tell them you’d managed to sneak some of the ships past the automated defenses, probably using an elevator.”
“Automated defenses?”
“Yeah,” he nodded earnestly. “Anyone who ignores the rules and tries to land on the surface finds out pretty quickly that the ancients gave this place some impressively dangerous defenses.
“Anything between orbit and two hundred feet above hard-deck gets fried to a crisp. Anyway, the story was gonna be all about how you were using the ancient ships’ portal-generators to slip between universes.”
It was a pretty lame theory. Still, Melchior clearly thought people would be fool enough to buy it, so he must have thought it was believable enough.
Meesh drove the smile from his face with a heavy sigh. “Shit!” he said, not quite under his breath.
Mila nodded at him. “It’s too close for comfort.”
“You stupid bastard!” Meesh glared down at Melchior. “You made that story up?”
The Ashurapolitan raised his bound hands. “I can change the story!” he begged, eyes wide again with fear. “I was just trying to make enough credits to get out of this hole. I had no idea…”
“Apparently,” Meesh agreed. “Well, you can’t change it now, not when you know how close you came with the first one!”
“We’ll just have to make a mess,” Mila concluded. “We don’t have the sheeting with us.”
“Yeah, we don’t have it,” Meesh needled her, his eyes rolling sarcastically.
“What the hells is that supposed to mean,” she growled.
“You were the one who didn’t bring the sheeting.”
She threw out her hands. “Why am I supposed to be the one who brings it?”
“Because I’m in charge,” he countered. “I don’t carry the supplies; I tell someone else to do it.”
“And you told me this when?”
Meesh opened his mouth but then closed it again. His left eye twitched. “It’s just assumed!”
“I don’t recall assuming it.”
Time to climb down from our ‘decision’ to kill him. Meesh felt kind of bad, scaring the poor fellow, but his dumb story was too good to waste. “There’s no way I’m going all the way back for sheeting,” he said with an air of finality.
“We’re gonna take our chances on the quality of local law enforcement?” Mila asked. “Witnesses can say all they like but, if there’s no DNA found, there’s no case. We’re running a hells of a risk here.”
Meesh pulled out his pistol. “You were the one who wanted to make sure we had time to look around after – see the sights, so to speak.”
“Yeah,” she said but in a way that disagreed. “Thing is, if we kill him, it lends credence to his story. Those guys out there have probably heard the whole thing from him already. If we show up and kill him…”
“It’s true,” Melchior nodded earnestly. “The
y know what I was planning to tell people. They laughed at me,” he added indignantly. “Who’s the fool now?”
Meesh looked down at him, tied up and waiting for death. For the life of him, he couldn’t tell if he was making an ironic joke. “You told everyone out there?”
An eager nod.
“So, we can’t rely on you to keep your mouth shut?”
He shrank back from the Human but then a gleam of hope sparkled in his eye. “You wanted to look around, right? I can serve as your guide. I can show you another transport crater, one of the craters that haven’t been scavenged yet. There’s thousands of them. You’d have seen one when you took the ships, but I know how to activate the systems, show you how they used to look in their glory days!”
“Glory days,” Meesh mused. “That sounds like something worth seeing. How do we get there?”
Melchior looked around. “This is the control room. If we go out that door at the back, we’ll be in a hall that takes us to a drop shaft.”
Mila’s hand came to rest on her pistol-grip. “Why don’t I like the sound of that?”
“No, look, it’s OK,” Melchior insisted. “I’ll go first to prove it’s not some trap. It’s the fastest way down to the hyperloop.”
“Really?” Meesh raised an eyebrow. “We’re back to the made-up stories again? A hyperloop that still works after tens of thousands of years and I suppose it still has vacuum?”
“It didn’t when I found it, but I like to tinker. You gotta realize we’re not really talking about tens of thousands of years with this stuff.” He shrugged. “Sure, it’s all really that old but the power-scrubbers tend to blow out after a century or so. After that, there’s no wear and tear. The circuitry had no current in it, the parts weren’t moving and these guys use some kind of alloy that’s nearly impervious to oxidation.”
Meesh looked up at Mila.
She took her hand from her weapon. “Couldn’t hurt to take a look.”
Meesh crouched to cut the bindings on the Ashurapolitan’s hands. He gestured with the knife, waggling it in Melchior’s face. “Don’t screw with us or we go back to Plan A, got it?”
“You won’t regret this!” The erstwhile victim scrambled to his feet and gestured to the rear door. “You two will be the only other two that know about this.”
Even if Meesh couldn’t feel his sincerity, he would have been able to read the sudden look of alarm on Melchior’s face as he realized he was revealing another possible reason for killing him later.
“Tell you what,” Meesh said, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder, “you do right by us and we’ll return the favor. You said you wanted out of here, right?”
A wary nod.
“Maybe we help you out with that.” He gestured. “Lead on.”
They found the shaft at a junction of hallways.
“I’ll go first,” Melchior offered again.
And somehow get back out a few floors down while we drop to our deaths? Meesh wondered. “Can we all go at once?”
Melchior thought about it for a moment. “Probably,” he finally conceded. “This would be quite a bottleneck if you could only send one passenger at a time.”
“Hold hands,” Meesh ordered.
They lined up on the threshold with Mila on one end and Meesh on the other. “Three, two, one, jump!” Meesh yelled and they hopped in together.
The walls were racing unnervingly up past the trio but they’d never have noticed if their eyes were closed.
“Why don’t we feel the air rushing past us,” Mila yelled unnecessarily.
“Don’t really know,” Melchior said a touch too loudly. “I think it has to do with the same system that stops us at the bottom. I think it selectively grabs us, somehow, along with the air.”
“Are those other stops that I’m seeing?” Meesh asked, forcing himself to speak normally.
“Yes, but I haven’t figured out how to stop there yet,” Melchior said. “Maybe the ancients had implants that let them communicate with the systems. But I’d need to find a body to know for sure.”
“No one’s ever found an ancient’s body?”
“Not that I know of but, then, I’m not briefed in on matters of state or high commerce. Might be one of the big defense contractors has something on ice?”
The bottom suddenly made itself apparent and it rushed up to them with such alarming speed that Meesh was tempted to use his limited telekinetic abilities on himself. He willed himself to trust the shaft’s systems and, when his feet settled gently on the floor, he let out a breath he didn’t even remember holding.
He stood there, trying to get his breathing back under control, and he stole a sideways glance, glad to see Mila was in the same condition. “Well, that was bracing,” he said with more than a little understatement.
The other two both chuckled.
Melchior pointed to the left of the cavernous space they’d found themselves in. “Train’s over that way.”
He led them past rows of large seats and benches, following in the same direction as the massive arches that spanned the ornate, open space. An airlock was beyond the seating, attached to a large, transparent tube. Inside, a five-car train awaited passengers. It looked as though it had been stripped down to the basic framework and Meesh assumed it had been stripped by the prospectors for re-sale.
“You’ll need your suits closed up,” Melchior warned. “The tube is still able to hold vacuum but the train seals have mostly failed, so you have no atmo inside.”
He approached to a spot where the footprints on the dusty floor became erratic and he jumped up in the air.
Meesh reached for his weapon as their guide waved his arms around in a bizarre fashion, still jumping. He grinned, letting go of the pistol as the large airlock doors suddenly whispered open for them.
The smuggler grinned over his shoulder. “Like being a kid again, eh?”
“I really wouldn’t know,” Meesh muttered quietly. They followed him into the airlock, closing up their suits.
Melchior pressed the control on his emergency suit and the nanites scrambled out of the housing, building a light flexible grid-work around his body and setting shield micro-gen tabs at strategic points along the framework. As the final tendrils of nanites stopped near his face, the entire thing came online, casting a hazy blue aura around him.
The airlock cycled and the inner door opened soundlessly. Meesh started forward but stopped in alarm, catching Mila by the arm. Melchior walked calmly into the open space, suspended, apparently, in mid-air. “Weird, no?”
“Thought the body had been torn out,” Meesh said, taking a tentative step onto a floor that was invisible, though, now that he looked, he could see a light patina of dust and wear in the corners. “The bodywork is made of something with the same index of refraction as air!”
“They had good reason,” Melchior told them. “There’s some spectacular views along our route!”
It fit what they already knew about the smuggler that the voice pickups in his suit were so low quality. He was someone at the bottom of what passed for civilization out here. His barely functional emergency suit was emblematic of a life on the ragged edge of oblivion.
Here he was, calmly riding a train with no air in a suit with little in the way of long-term prospects. Meesh felt a surge of pity. What sort of a life leads someone to this bleak existence?
They all staggered aft as the train lurched into motion. Like the orbital elevators, this vehicle’s acceleration management was tuned to a much larger species and the bulk of their mass would have been much higher than the current passengers.
The walls of the station slid past and they were in a tunnel, accelerating rapidly until their view was little more than a dark gray blur. Meesh was just about to offer a sarcastic opinion about the view when the tunnel ended and they found themselves in a massive open space.
Melchior chuckled. “Been through here a few times and it still startles the life out of me every time I get to this part.”
“It’s like being shot out of a rail-gun,” Meesh agreed, his heart still racing. “The tube we’re riding in seems to be made of the same stuff as the train body. I keep expecting us to start falling.”
He looked down through the floor. Shafts of white light streaked up to bounce off convex reflectors, diffusing light throughout the chamber. “It’s hard to find a frame of reference, but it looks like you could fit Kwharaz Station in here!”
“There’s forests down there,” Mila exclaimed.
“And up there,” Melchior pointed to large platforms throughout the space. “I think some of them were for crop production but the birds brought up tree seeds in their digestive systems. It’s all turned wild.”
“There are still birds here?” Meesh asked. “Birds the ancients would have seen?”
The smuggler nodded soberly, eyes wide. “Yeah, you want to be careful out here. You can run into some seriously weird shit, if you’re not paying attention!” He held out his arm, an angry red welt visible through the flickering blue haze of his suit.
“You see this scar?” he asked. “Some kind of flying insect, big enough jaws to take your head clean off! I was taking a leak by one of the rivers down there, and the damn thing came at me from behind!”
“Be glad it went for your arm, considering what you were doing when it showed up,” Mila advised.
Melchior laughed. “True enough but, all the same, there are dangerous predators down there. I don’t know what the ancients were thinking. It’s all well and good to build a fully functional ecosystem but common sense should step in, at some point, and impose a few limits!”
“I very much doubt they intended it for use as a public toilet,” Meesh said helpfully. “Perhaps it’s a nature preserve. They probably brought all the genomes of their home-world with them, so they’d be less home-sick.”
“Or this was their home-system,” the smuggler suggested.
“Unlikely,” Meesh said, still staring out at the nearly globe-shaped cavern. “Takes millions or even Billions of years to get through the red-giant phase. That’s a long time to hang around waiting. They probably went out searching for white dwarfs to build around.”
Humans Page 22
